Monthly Archives: September 2019

Welcome back! If you’re returning to Kent after the summer break, here’s a helpful summary for settling back in.

Timetables will be on the Student Guide before term starts on the 23 September 2019.

Lectures for all modules and stage 2 & 3 module group allocations will be released on Monday 9 September 2019.

For Stage 0 & 1 modules, group allocations will be finalised by Friday 20 September 2019.

You must be registered on your modules for your personal timetable to show. Continue to go back and check your timetable regularly for updates including other events. Read our Timetabling FAQs.

You will need to register on SDS from Tuesday 17 September 2019 so we know you’re definitely coming back. You don’t need to register in person or attend arrivals weekend. This is for new students. Please pay any outstanding fees to the University so you can register and delays are avoided. To ensure swift payment of your student loan, you are advised to re-register by Wednesday 18 September 2019. It takes 3-5 working days from the point of registration for funds to be released to your account. Read more.

Term starts on Monday 23 September 2019. Welcome Week is the week before (16-20 September). View term dates

If you’ve got a new phone, tablet or laptop, get it Kent WiFi-ready before you come back to campus by running our WiFi setup tool. For friends or family visiting campus, WiFi Guest is available for those who don’t have a Kent IT Account, an eduroam account or govroam account.

Living off campus is very different from living in University accommodation. Read our community webpages for information on bills, bins, neighbours and much more!

The School of Economics has moved to the Kennedy Building, which is located between the Sports Centre, Jennison and opposite Sibson. The Kennedy building provides more dedicated social and meeting spaces for students and staff. There are also 11 new central teaching rooms in the building including an IT suite.

The game allows participants to understand the ways in which copyright law impacts on the day to day workings of an educational institution, looking at teaching, research and engagement. It is appropriate for all staff who work with copyright material (so pretty much anyone who uses a computer) and participants will learn about:

Emma has been a keen crocheter for several years and has been involved in some of the yarn bombs in and around the School of English. Using her skills, she decided to put together a project involving some of the staff from the school. The project entailed crocheting a generous amount of flowers for the empty planters. Within 4 hours, the team had created vibrant crochet flowers to fill the underused planters in Hut 8.

Emma hopes to continue developing the project and also hopes to put in place more projects for incoming Turing students in the next academic year.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to get a degree in a fraction of the time it normally takes? The One Hour Degree game has been produced specifically for students who are about to join or have recently begun their degree journey at Kent.

It is a narrative based adventure game which simulates all the significant elements of gaining a degree condensed into as little as one hour.

There are five independent ‘quests’ focused on Welcome Week, the first term, the first year, year 2 and year 3. The game introduces key facilities, support networks and social opportunities that are available at Kent as well as displaying stunning imagery of our parkland campus.

Players will earn ‘knowledge’ and ‘wellbeing’ points along the way as well as a badge for each completed quest. Together they will dictate the classification of the ‘degree’ received at the end before you have the opportunity to be part of your very own graduation video. With more than 100 million unique pathways through the game, you can easily choose a different story path each time to see how different decisions result in different outcomes.

The game does not require a login or user account and can be played by anyone who has access to a web browser, on any device.

Kent and Medway Medical School held its first Virtual Open Day on Tuesday 10 September. The event was hosted on YouTube and featured presentations from the founding Dean, Chris Holland and members of the senior academic and clinical team. The event was hosted by Louisa Britton from KMTV who also supported KMMS technically.

The live event attracted 204 participants and at its peak had 75 concurrent viewers. The audience had an average screen time of 28 minutes and questions flooded in throughout the two-hour broadcast. Overnight the recorded stream had over 80 more views with international visitors from India, Spain, Italy and Lebanon to name a few.

Mary Langford, Communications Manager says: ‘As we have a relatively short admissions window (KMMS applications close on 15 October) we wanted to try doing something online to allow prospective students to hear more about us without having the expense of travelling to Canterbury. We ran it in the early evening to allow people to get home from school or work and then tune in.’

Philip Chan, Admissions Lead says: ‘At KMMS we are committed to innovation in all areas. We felt that running a virtual open day allowed prospective students to engage with KMMS in a new way – to hear from the senior team and ask live questions from their mobile devices. We were really impressed by the quality and variety of questions we were asked and the number of people who engaged with it live – we will definitely do this again.’

You can now book to attend a Crucial Conversations two day course in October. The objective of the course is to support leaders at Kent to achieve results through bold, courageous dialogue, with their teams and each other. To enable leaders to create a climate of mutual trust and respect and to provide tools, techniques and materials for participants to take away and apply to real-life leadership situations.

This two-day programme is for academic and professional service leaders. The target audience is primarily Grades 9&10. However, if you are operating in a Leadership role outside these grades and you feel it would be of benefit to you, please contact us before booking, by emailing LDev@kent.ac.uk

The University is adding to its green credentials with a move to replace plastic drinking cups across campus.

All new students staying on campus will once again receive an eco-friendly reusable Bamboo coffee cup and a fully recyclable, sustainable water bottle.

And, for the first time this year, a free water bottle will be offered to all staff too. The bottle, made from sustainable sugar cane, is fully recyclable and has a negative carbon footprint. As well as the University of Kent logo, it includes a QR code which users can scan to find the nearest available refillable water station.

The bottles will be available, on production of a KentOne ID card, from next week (wc 16 September) at Kent Hospitality outlets across Canterbury and Medway campuses. Bamboo coffee cups will also be available at the same outlets at a cost of £5 each.

The new bottles and cups are part of a package of measures at Kent to reduce our carbon footprint and increase our sustainability. This latest initiative has been led by members of Kent Hospitality, working alongside Kent Union, Estates and Procurement as part of the University’s Sustainable Food Steering Group, which oversees our sustainable food strategy.

The initiative also fits in well with the University strategy, Kent 2025, which states that, we will ‘embed sustainability through building the UN Sustainable Development Goals into our research, education, leadership, operations, administration and engagement.’

Kevin Stuckey, Director of Commercial Services, explains: ‘We were already working with Kent Union’s President Sasha Langeveldt to provide sustainable drinking cups and bottles. However, our Vice-Chancellor was keen for us to extend this across campus and eventually remove the need for any single-use plastic cups.

‘We therefore doubled our order for new water bottles this year so we could offer staff, as well as new residential students a sustainable alternative. We hope this will be welcomed by not only our staff, but the wider community, as Kent does its bit to reduce its carbon footprint.’

This month’s talk by DICE (Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology) focuses on their ground-breaking work on the impacts of palm oil on conservation and local people’s livelihoods in Indonesia and Malaysia. The talk will be given by Drs Matt Struebig and Jake Bicknell from DICE.

The DICE talks are a monthly set of free and public events that showcase the work of DICE members, students and alumni. They take place between 18:00 and 19:00 on a Thursday each month and everyone is welcome to attend.

Colleagues are invited to an update on Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes (TEF) Framework and Subject Level Pilots, by Professor April McMahon, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Education. The update will take place on Friday 13 September from 13.30 to 14.30 (Grimond Lecture Theatre 2).

The presentation is part of our preparations for the next round on TEF. It will include a general update on the TEF framework and its development following the completion of the second year of testing pilot options for subject level assessment. The presentation will also outline what TEF is, how it works, and what it is for, and consider some of the challenges and benefits of including a subject level perspective.

April will discuss some of the work we are doing at the University of Kent to prepare for subject-level TEF, and how important it is for us to approach this as a university community, with academic, professional and student perspectives all contributing and everyone having a role to play.

We hope to see as many of you as possible on 13 September. If you are unable to attend, you can listen to the event via this link (available to anyone with a Kent IT account).